Back to Wando Passo, David Payne [little red riding hood ebook .TXT] 📗

“Claire?”

She didn’t hear.

“Claire?”

Still nothing.

“Claire!”

She jumped. “Shit, Ransom!” She poked her face though the curtain. “Who are you, the midnight rambler? Where did you go?”

Out for a midnight gambol with Nightmare, my trusty steed, the voice suggested. He vetoed the proposal. “I took a walk,” he said. “I think we need to talk….”

TWENTY-FOUR

What is there to say?” she asks him in the bedroom. “I saw you kiss her mouth. I saw Clarisse kiss you. Unless you can persuade me to disregard the evidence of my own senses, my two eyes…”

“I can’t,” says Harlan. “I don’t intend to try. You saw what you saw, and I regret what you saw. I regret the pain I’ve caused. But I must tell you, Addie, you don’t understand what you saw. You don’t begin to understand….”

“What don’t I understand?” she interrupts. “Is it your intention to have a Negro mistress in the cottage and a white wife at the house? Did you expect me to consent to such arrangements?”

“That is not my intention, madam. It has never been my intention. You are groping in the dark. You are miles from a true understanding of the case. If you’ll attempt to calm yourself and let me speak, I will explain. If, when I conclude, you wish to leave, I won’t stand in your way. My hope, though, Addie, my fervent hope, is otherwise. My hope is that you’ll stand by me and fight for me, as I intend to stand and fight for you. Despite appearances, I’m fighting for you now.”

Her laugh is sharp. “You are right! You are so right! Spending the night—our wedding night—in another woman’s bed does not give the appearance that you are fighting for your wife!”

“I didn’t spend it there by choice.”

“I see,” she says. “Her charms, then, her Cuban charms, are simply such that you were helpless to resist….”

“I am bewitched.”

Addie’s eyes widen. She starts to laugh again. Her mouth actually falls open to emit the laugh, but something in Harlan’s sobriety stops her. He isn’t sweating now, isn’t making the large, emphatic gestures of the hands. Some new self-possession has stolen over him. Is it his father’s death? Whether that or something else, his hazy ginger eyes, for once, are clear. His expression is that of a man in contemplation of a peril, not panicked before it, but serious, alert. A thought flies through Addie’s mind—the clearing in the woods and what she saw inside the hollow of the tree…The small, clawed feet of fear skitter up her spine like mice. Yet she can’t take his assertion without contest.

“You are bewitched,” she repeats with scorn.

“You smile, madam. But it’s no laughing matter, I assure you. Will you hear me?”

Addie won’t give him the satisfaction of an answer. Her heart is set against him now. Yet what choice does she have except to listen, and Harlan reads her face and sees she has no choice.

“For you to grasp this matter…I must take you back,” he says, lighting his cigar, “…to the beginning. I ask you to remember, Addie, that my memory of Clarisse, my sole childhood memory, is of a swaddled bundle in Paloma’s arms, a voice that, at the quinta, sometimes woke me in the night. I was six the day we sailed for Charleston. Father and Paloma were both there. The bundle wasn’t. There was no more crying in the night. I didn’t see Clarisse again till I was thirty-three.

“She was raised at La Mella, in Villa-Urrutia’s household. I’ve told you this before, but what is crucial for you to understand is that Paloma was pregnant when Father won her, but the child, by law and right, belonged to Wenceslao. The Count, as you may readily imagine, wasn’t pleased to lose his slave and favorite mistress and was certainly in no mood, no mood at all, to toss Clarisse, as further lagniappe, into Father’s pile. So Paloma came with Father, but Clarisse, when she was born, went back to Wenceslao, and the old Count found her charming, by reports. She is beautiful, I think you can agree….”

“Yes,” says Addie, clipped.

“And charming, when she has a mind. And the Conde, you see, was old, Addie. His other children were all grown. So she became his pet. He raised her as his own, sent her to the Franciscans in Guanabacoa, spoiled her, allowed her to dress like a marquise, and at his death, he set her free and left her little but her wardrobe and her jewels. I knew nothing of this situation, Addie. The day I sailed for Cuba to apprentice, on the very wharf, Father took me aside and pressed an envelope into my hand. In it were a name and an address, a sum of cash. He told me the story in no greater detail than I’m telling you right now. A good deal less, in fact. He asked me to seek her out, to settle the sum upon her, to help her if I could. Understand, Addie, at that point in time, eight years ago, Clarisse was no more than a name to me, the Negro daughter of my father’s Negro concubine.

“But Cuba is different, Addie, as I said before. I began to feel the change some miles in the offing, while still at sea. The warm south wind off the island brought a smell of spice, of poinciana. I felt a kind of spell steal over me. At the docks, my first moment there, I was almost run down by a quitrín. The Negro coachman, the calesero, in his top hat and silver spurs, made some rude call in Spanish and raised his whip to frighten me. Me, a white man. Through the window, Addie, as the carriage clattered past, I saw a dark-faced woman, a mulatto or quadroon. She was wearing silks and jewels, sitting regally on the upholstered bench. She gazed at me with cutting eyes, as though I deserved to be run